Podcasts about Belize

In this episode, we sit down with Dorian Rivero, owner of Private Belize Adventure and tour guide of over 20 years, to discuss what activities are available to visitors based in Belize City such as those looking for a way to enjoy their Belize layover during a cruise.  Belize City, being one of the first settlements, has a rich history and many historical relics, whether it be the artifacts in museums or the colonial style building, there is always a sight to see. From here, people are in the perfect location to embark on quick trips to more exotic destinations such as an ancient Mayan city or cave tubing through a gorgeous underground river. With Dorian and Private Belize Adventure, take a virtual walkthrough of a combo tour where guests book private trips to do just that, spending the day exploring the ruins of Altun Ha in addition to floating down the blue waters and breathtaking caverns of Nohoch Che'en.  Anyone can book this tour on Belizing.com Altun Ha is unique, as the ancient city once served as a center of manufacturing and trade yet is not built on a body of water. Meanwhile, Nohoch Che'en provides an unforgettable cave-tubing experience where guests also get the opportunity to explore some dry branches of the cave to uncover artifacts frozen in time like abandoned Mayan pottery, left untouched for ages. In between or along the way shop at nearby establishments, and when it comes time, enjoy the delicious Belizean lunch provided. No need to worry about any park fees or equipment needed for your adventure; everything is included: tubes, life vests, helmets, and lights. There are many memories to be made from Belize City. Let's go make them. Let's go Belizing!

It was my pleasure to speak with returning guest Jenny Schiltz again today about her upcoming trip to Belize and their sacred Mayan sites. I always have a good time hearing Jenny's perspective and understanding of things. For more info about and to purchase a distance healing and tincture from these Sacred Sites, check out her page; jennyschiltz.com/mayan-magic To learn more about me (Karen) and the work that I do, go to rebalancewithreiki.com - if you are local to Northern NJ and you'd like to check out my store front you can visit my page moonmagicwellness.com. For more information about my online course Spiritual Seekers 101 go here. For more info and to book a distance healing session with me go here.

In this podcast I interviewed Mark Davidson, whose father was murdered on the island of Belize. Mark and his family live in Pasadena, CA, and he was returning home from a business trip when he learned about his father's death. In his interview Mark shares his story and describes what it was like to travel back and forth across international borders to say goodbye to his dad and sort through his belongings. He processes his grief, how he has changed and what it has been like to share his dad's death with his young son. Mark has found a way to remain connected to his father in his new business where he provides immersive marine education, and he describes how the ocean helps him feel close to his dad. Please visit our new Facebook group “Talking about the Podcast Untethered with Dr. Levin” to learn more about Mark and his immersive marine education business. Also included are photos and a link to the Spotify playlist that Mark mentions in the podcast. Here is the link for our new Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2341269439362238. Thank you so much for joining today's episode of Untethered: Healing the Pain After a Sudden Death. For help with a sudden and unexpected loss, sign up for my free mini course, where I will teach you about the 3 Truths About Living with A Sudden and Unexpected Loss. Please visit www.fromgrieftogrowth.com to sign up.

Website for this episode: ordinarysherpa.com/098 Register for the FREE Travel Rewards for Families Live Q & A: Ordinarysherpa.com/LIVE At one time, our guest worked in healthcare, but was (not so secretly) addicted to travel. He's been to over 100 countries and seven continents. What sets him apart from many of the travelers I know is his approach; his uncanny way to make you laugh and be completely envious of him experiencing incredible locations with his kids.  While many parents like taking breaks from their kids and heading overseas without them. Their family is not like that. Starting at age four, each of his kids got to pick any destination in the world every year for a one-on-one trip, and his kids weren't shy about picking crazy destinations – trips have included Australia (ages 4 and 6), Hong Kong (5), Belize (4), Easter Island (6), Iguazu Falls (6), Bali (9 and 10), Japan (7 and 8), the Maldives (9), and Antarctica (8) and that was just when they were ages 4-8.  In 2012 he was lucky enough to win Conde Nast Traveler Magazine's Photo of the Year contest out of 21,000+ entrants. The magazine planned an amazing two weeks in Florence for them. The first two days there three different people called him Babbo – Italian for Dad or Daddy. The kids started using it and it stuck – they haven't called him Dad since they returned from that trip. The funny thing is that Babbo only means Dad in certain parts of Italy. In other areas it means Idiot. Today I am excited to have a conversation with the Family Travel influencer who literally has the registered trademark to Take Your Kids Everywhere, Eric Stoen of Travel Babbo, Welcome to Ordinary Sherpa.   Follow or Connect with Eric at: Website: https://travelbabbo.com/ Instagram: @travelbabbo  Key Takeaways Eric will go wherever the kids want to go or return to.  There are many things that make a location returnable, it's whatever speaks to our hearts.  For us we visit Italy specifically Florence and Tuscany or the Greek Isle of Naxos.  So much so that locals know our names in several of the locations.  Let the kids have a stake in planning.  Look for kid-friendly tours.  They are simplified and the content is perfect for parents too.   Parent first, then traveler, then a photographer and travel writer.  He didn't want travel to become not fun for the kids ot getting paid to do things that weren't kid-friendly. I'm not afraid to show my kids faces, but seeing those accounts didn't inspire me.  Most times I shared photos of my kids often walking away because that's naturally where I was and they weren't interested in posing. Even if a place looks cool online doesn't mean it's a great kid-friendly place. Capture what's authentic and find the details that speak to you.  Eric is not willing to disrupt their vacation for work.  his followers deserve better and he wanted to maintain an organic nature of photography - not sponsored, posed photos.  He set a boundary that he didn't accept free travel.  He wasn't going to travel without his family unless he was getting paid. Networking is everything and meeting people in person is a game changer.  Travel writers and adventure brands are fun to be around.  Go to events and meet people face-to-face.  For Eric, while he was new and uncomfortable at ITB Berlin, Geeking out with new destinations was a trip and he often meets people that he'd like to hang out and travel with.  What's your intro? Have 20 seconds that describes why are you unique? Why would someone work with you? What is your attitude on travel? What is your perspective on ___? Your intro is what makes you memorable.  Travel is cumulative.  Explore with your kids as early as you can because good things will come of it.   Resources referenced during this episode:Start Here: https://travelbabbo.com/start-here/ Month by Month Guide to the Best Vacations with Kids: https://travelbabbo.com/best-vacations-for-kids/

About BenBen Whaley is a staff software engineer at Chime. Ben is co-author of the UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook, the de facto standard text on Linux administration, and is the author of two educational videos: Linux Web Operations and Linux System Administration. He is an AWS Community Hero since 2014. Ben has held Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) and Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) certifications. He earned a B.S. in Computer Science from Univ. of Colorado, Boulder.Links Referenced: Chime Financial: https://www.chime.com/ alternat.cloud: https://alternat.cloud Twitter: https://twitter.com/iamthewhaley LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benwhaley/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Forget everything you know about SSH and try Tailscale. Imagine if you didn't need to manage PKI or rotate SSH keys every time someone leaves. That'd be pretty sweet, wouldn't it? With Tailscale SSH, you can do exactly that. Tailscale gives each server and user device a node key to connect to its VPN, and it uses the same node key to authorize and authenticate SSH.Basically you're SSHing the same way you manage access to your app. What's the benefit here? Built-in key rotation, permissions as code, connectivity between any two devices, reduce latency, and there's a lot more, but there's a time limit here. You can also ask users to reauthenticate for that extra bit of security. Sounds expensive?Nope, I wish it were. Tailscale is completely free for personal use on up to 20 devices. To learn more, visit snark.cloud/tailscale. Again, that's snark.cloud/tailscaleCorey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn and this is an episode unlike any other that has yet been released on this august podcast. Let's begin by introducing my first-time guest somehow because apparently an invitation got lost in the mail somewhere. Ben Whaley is a staff software engineer at Chime Financial and has been an AWS Community Hero since Andy Jassy was basically in diapers, to my level of understanding. Ben, welcome to the show.Ben: Corey, so good to be here. Thanks for having me on.Corey: I'm embarrassed that you haven't been on the show before. You're one of those people that slipped through the cracks and somehow I was very bad at following up slash hounding you into finally agreeing to be here. But you certainly waited until you had something auspicious to talk about.Ben: Well, you know, I'm the one that really should be embarrassed here. You did extend the invitation and I guess I just didn't feel like I had something to drop. But I think today we have something that will interest most of the listeners without a doubt.Corey: So, folks who have listened to this podcast before, or read my newsletter, or follow me on Twitter, or have shared an elevator with me, or at any point have passed me on the street, have heard me complain about the Managed NAT Gateway and it's egregious data processing fee of four-and-a-half cents per gigabyte. And I have complained about this for small customers because they're in the free tier; why is this thing charging them 32 bucks a month? And I have complained about this on behalf of large customers who are paying the GDP of the nation of Belize in data processing fees as they wind up shoving very large workloads to and fro, which is I think part of the prerequisite requirements for having a data warehouse. And you are no different than the rest of these people who have those challenges, with the singular exception that you have done something about it, and what you have done is so, in retrospect, blindingly obvious that I am embarrassed the rest of us never thought of it.Ben: It's interesting because when you are doing engineering, it's often the simplest solution that is the best. I've seen this repeatedly. And it's a little surprising that it didn't come up before, but I think it's in some way, just a matter of timing. But what we came up with—and is this the right time to get into it, do you want to just kind of name the solution, here?Corey: Oh, by all means. I'm not going to steal your thunder. Please, tell us what you have wrought.Ben: We're calling it AlterNAT and it's an alternative solution to a high-availability NAT solution. As everybody knows, NAT Gateway is sort of the default choice; it certainly is what AWS pushes everybody towards. But there is, in fact, a legacy solution: NAT instances. These were around long before NAT Gateway made an appearance. And like I said they're considered legacy, but with the help of lots of modern AWS innovations and technologies like Lambdas and auto-scaling groups with max instance lifetimes and the latest generation of networking improved or enhanced instances, it turns out that we can maybe not quite get as effective as a NAT Gateway, but we can save a lot of money and skip those data processing charges entirely by having a NAT instance solution with a failover NAT Gateway, which I think is kind of the key point behind the solution. So, are you interested in diving into the technical details?Corey: That is very much the missing piece right there. You're right. What we used to use was NAT instances. That was the thing that we used because we didn't really have another option. And they had an interface in the public subnet where they lived and an interface hanging out in the private subnet, and they had to be configured to wind up passing traffic to and fro.Well, okay, that's great and all but isn't that kind of brittle and dangerous? I basically have a single instance as a single point of failure and these are the days early on when individual instances did not have the level of availability and durability they do now. Yeah, it's kind of awful, but here you go. I mean, the most galling part of the Managed NAT Gateway service is not that it's expensive; it's that it's expensive, but also incredibly good at what it does. You don't have to think about this whole problem anymore, and as of recently, it also supports ipv4 to ipv6 translation as well.It's not that the service is bad. It's that the service is stonkingly expensive, particularly at scale. And everything that we've seen before is either oh, run your own NAT instances or bend your knee and pays your money. And a number of folks have come up with different options where this is ridiculous. Just go ahead and run your own NAT instances.Yeah, but what happens when I have to take it down for maintenance or replace it? It's like, well, I guess you're not going to the internet today. This has the, in hindsight, obvious solution, well, we just—we run the Managed NAT Gateway because the 32 bucks a year in instance-hour charges don't actually matter at any point of scale when you're doing this, but you wind up using that for day in, day out traffic, and the failover mode is simply you'll use the expensive Managed NAT Gateway until the instance is healthy again and then automatically change the route table back and forth.Ben: Yep. That's exactly it. So, the auto-scaling NAT instance solution has been around for a long time well, before even NAT Gateway was released. You could have NAT instances in an auto-scaling group where the size of the group was one, and if the NAT instance failed, it would just replace itself. But this left a period in which you'd have no internet connectivity during that, you know, when the NAT instance was swapped out.So, the solution here is that when auto-scaling terminates an instance, it fails over the route table to a standby NAT Gateway, rerouting the traffic. So, there's never a point at which there's no internet connectivity, right? The NAT instance is running, processing traffic, gets terminated after a certain period of time, configurable, 14 days, 30 days, whatever makes sense for your security strategy could be never, right? You could choose that you want to have your own maintenance window in which to do it.Corey: And let's face it, this thing is more or less sitting there as a network traffic router, for lack of a better term. There is no need to ever log into the thing and make changes to it until and unless there's a vulnerability that you can exploit via somehow just talking to the TCP stack when nothing's actually listening on the host.Ben: You know, you can run your own AMI that has been pared down to almost nothing, and that instance doesn't do much. It's using just a Linux kernel to sit on two networks and pass traffic back and forth. It has a translation table that kind of keeps track of the state of connections and so you don't need to have any service running. To manage the system, we have SSM so you can use Session Manager to log in, but frankly, you can just disable that. You almost never even need to get a shell. And that is, in fact, an option we have in the solution is to disable SSM entirely.Corey: One of the things I love about this approach is that it is turnkey. You throw this thing in there and it's good to go. And in the event that the instance becomes unhealthy, great, it fails traffic over to the Managed NAT Gateway while it terminates the old node and replaces it with a healthy one and then fails traffic back. Now, I do need to ask, what is the story of network connections during that failover and failback scenario?Ben: Right, that's the primary drawback, I would say, of the solution is that any established TCP connections that are on the NAT instance at the time of a route change will be lost. So, say you have—Corey: TCP now terminates on the floor.Ben: Pretty much. The connections are dropped. If you have an open SSH connection from a host in the private network to a host on the internet and the instance fails over to the NAT Gateway, the NAT Gateway doesn't have the translation table that the NAT instance had. And not to mention, the public IP address also changes because you have an Elastic IP assigned to the NAT instance, a different Elastic IP assigned to the NAT Gateway, and so because that upstream IP is different, the remote host is, like, tracking the wrong IP. So, those connections, they're going to be lost.So, there are some use cases where this may not be suitable. We do have some ideas on how you might mitigate that, for example, with the use of a maintenance window to schedule the replacement, replaced less often so it doesn't have to affect your workflow as much, but frankly, for many use cases, my belief is that it's actually fine. In our use case at Chime, we found that it's completely fine and we didn't actually experience any errors or failures. But there might be some use cases that are more sensitive or less resilient to failure in the first place.Corey: I would also point out that a lot of how software is going to behave is going to be a reflection of the era in which it was moved to cloud. Back in the early days of EC2, you had no real sense of reliability around any individual instance, so everything was written in a very defensive manner. These days, with instances automatically being able to flow among different hardware so we don't get instance interrupt notifications the way we once did on a semi-constant basis, it more or less has become what presents is bulletproof, so a lot of people are writing software that's a bit more brittle. But it's always been a best practice that when a connection fails okay, what happens at failure? Do you just give up and throw your hands in the air and shriek for help or do you attempt to retry a few times, ideally backing off exponentially?In this scenario, those retries will work. So, it's a question of how well have you built your software. Okay, let's say that you made the worst decisions imaginable, and okay, if that connection dies, the entire workload dies. Okay, you have the option to refactor it to be a little bit better behaved, or alternately, you can keep paying the Manage NAT Gateway tax of four-and-a-half cents per gigabyte in perpetuity forever. I'm not going to tell you what decision to make, but I know which one I'm making.Ben: Yeah, exactly. The cost savings potential of it far outweighs the potential maintenance troubles, I guess, that you could encounter. But the fact is, if you're relying on Managed NAT Gateway and paying the price for doing so, it's not as if there's no chance for connection failure. NAT Gateway could also fail. I will admit that I think it's an extremely robust and resilient solution. I've been really impressed with it, especially so after having worked on this project, but it doesn't mean it can't fail.And beyond that, upstream of the NAT Gateway, something could in fact go wrong. Like, internet connections are unreliable, kind of by design. So, if your system is not resilient to connection failures, like, there's a problem to solve there anyway; you're kind of relying on hope. So, it's a kind of a forcing function in some ways to build architectural best practices, in my view.Corey: I can't stress enough that I have zero problem with the capabilities and the stability of the Managed NAT Gateway solution. My complaints about it start and stop entirely with the price. Back when you first showed me the blog post that is releasing at the same time as this podcast—and you can visit that at alternat.cloud—you sent me an early draft of this and what I loved the most was that your math was off because of a not complete understanding of the gloriousness that is just how egregious the NAT Gateway charges are.Your initial analysis said, “All right, if you're throwing half a terabyte out to the internet, this has the potential of cutting the bill by”—I think it was $10,000 or something like that. It's, “Oh no, no. It has the potential to cut the bill by an entire twenty-two-and-a-half thousand dollars.” Because this processing fee does not replace any egress fees whatsoever. It's purely additive. If you forget to have a free S3 Gateway endpoint in a private subnet, every time you put something into or take something out of S3, you're paying four-and-a-half cents per gigabyte on that, despite the fact there's no internet transitory work, it's not crossing availability zones. It is simply a four-and-a-half cent fee to retrieve something that has only cost you—at most—2.3 cents per month to store in the first place. Flip that switch, that becomes completely free.Ben: Yeah. I'm not embarrassed at all to talk about the lack of education I had around this topic. The fact is I'm an engineer primarily and I came across the cost stuff because it kind of seemed like a problem that needed to be solved within my organization. And if you don't mind, I might just linger on this point and kind of think back a few months. I looked at the AWS bill and I saw this egregious ‘EC2 Other' category. It was taking up the majority of our bill. Like, the single biggest line item was EC2 Other. And I was like, “What could this be?”Corey: I want to wind up flagging that just because that bears repeating because I often get people pushing back of, “Well, how bad—it's one Managed NAT Gateway. How much could it possibly cost? $10?” No, it is the majority of your monthly bill. I cannot stress that enough.And that's not because the people who work there are doing anything that they should not be doing or didn't understand all the nuances of this. It's because for the security posture that is required for what you do—you are at Chime Financial, let's be clear here—putting everything in public subnets was not really a possibility for you folks.Ben: Yeah. And not only that but there are plenty of services that have to be on private subnets. For example, AWS Glue services must run in private VPC subnets if you want them to be able to talk to other systems in your VPC; like, they cannot live in public subnet. So essentially, if you want to talk to the internet from those jobs, you're forced into some kind of NAT solution. So, I dug into the EC2 Other category and I started trying to figure out what was going on there.There's no way—natively—to look at what traffic is transiting the NAT Gateway. There's not an interface that shows you what's going on, what's the biggest talkers over that network. Instead, you have to have flow logs enabled and have to parse those flow logs. So, I dug into that.Corey: Well, you're missing a step first because in a lot of environments, people have more than one of these things, so you get to first do the scavenger hunt of, okay, I have a whole bunch of Managed NAT Gateways and first I need to go diving into CloudWatch metrics and figure out which are the heavy talkers. Is usually one or two followed by a whole bunch of small stuff, but not always, so figuring out which VPC you're even talking about is a necessary prerequisite.Ben: Yeah, exactly. The data around it is almost missing entirely. Once you come to the conclusion that it is a particular NAT Gateway—like, that's a set of problems to solve on its own—but first, you have to go to the flow logs, you have to figure out what are the biggest upstream IPs that it's talking to. Once you have the IP, it still isn't apparent what that host is. In our case, we had all sorts of outside parties that we were talking to a lot and it's a matter of sorting by volume and figuring out well, this IP, what is the reverse IP? Who is potentially the host there?I actually had some wrong answers at first. I set up VPC endpoints to S3 and DynamoDB and SQS because those were some top talkers and that was a nice way to gain some security and some resilience and save some money. And then I found, well, Datadog; that's another top talker for us, so I ended up creating a nice private link to Datadog, which they offer for free, by the way, which is more than I can say for some other vendors. But then I found some outside parties, there wasn't a nice private link solution available to us, and yet, it was by far the largest volume. So, that's what kind of started me down this track is analyzing the NAT Gateway myself by looking at VPC flow logs. Like, it's shocking that there isn't a better way to find that traffic.Corey: It's worse than that because VPC flow logs tell you where the traffic is going and in what volumes, sure, on an IP address and port basis, but okay, now you have a Kubernetes cluster that spans two availability zones. Okay, great. What is actually passing through that? So, you have one big application that just seems awfully chatty, you have multiple workloads running on the thing. What's the expensive thing talking back and forth? The only way that you can reliably get the answer to that I found is to talk to people about what those workloads are actually doing, and failing that you're going code spelunking.Ben: Yep. You're exactly right about that. In our case, it ended up being apparent because we have a set of subnets where only one particular project runs. And when I saw the source IP, I could immediately figure that part out. But if it's a K8s cluster in the private subnets, yeah, how are you going to find it out? You're going to have to ask everybody that has workloads running there.Corey: And we're talking about in some cases, millions of dollars a month. Yeah, it starts to feel a little bit predatory as far as how it's priced and the amount of work you have to put in to track this stuff down. I've done this a handful of times myself, and it's always painful unless you discover something pretty early on, like, oh, it's talking to S3 because that's pretty obvious when you see that. It's, yeah, flip switch and this entire engagement just paid for itself a hundred times over. Now, let's see what else we can discover.That is always one of those fun moments because, first, customers are super grateful to learn that, oh, my God, I flipped that switch. And I'm saving a whole bunch of money. Because it starts with gratitude. “Thank you so much. This is great.” And it doesn't take a whole lot of time for that to alchemize into anger of, “Wait. You mean, I've been being ridden like a pony for this long and no one bothered to mention that if I click a button, this whole thing just goes away?”And when you mention this to your AWS account team, like, they're solicitous, but they either have to present as, “I didn't know that existed either,” which is not a good look, or, “Yeah, you caught us,” which is worse. There's no positive story on this. It just feels like a tax on not knowing trivia about AWS. I think that's what really winds me up about it so much.Ben: Yeah, I think you're right on about that as well. My misunderstanding about the NAT pricing was data processing is additive to data transfer. I expected when I replaced NAT Gateway with NAT instance, that I would be substituting data transfer costs for NAT Gateway costs, NAT Gateway data processing costs. But in fact, NAT Gateway incurs both data processing and data transfer. NAT instances only incur data transfer costs. And so, this is a big difference between the two solutions.Not only that, but if you're in the same region, if you're egressing out of your say us-east-1 region and talking to another hosted service also within us-east-1—never leaving the AWS network—you don't actually even incur data transfer costs. So, if you're using a NAT Gateway, you're paying data processing.Corey: To be clear you do, but it is cross-AZ in most cases billed at one penny egressing, and on the other side, that hosted service generally pays one penny ingressing as well. Don't feel bad about that one. That was extraordinarily unclear and the only reason I know the answer to that is that I got tired of getting stonewalled by people that later turned out didn't know the answer, so I ran a series of experiments designed explicitly to find this out.Ben: Right. As opposed to the five cents to nine cents that is data transfer to the internet. Which, add that to data processing on a NAT Gateway and you're paying between thirteen-and-a-half cents to nine-and-a-half cents for every gigabyte egressed. And this is a phenomenal cost. And at any kind of volume, if you're doing terabytes to petabytes, this becomes a significant portion of your bill. And this is why people hate the NAT Gateway so much.Corey: I am going to short-circuit an angry comment I can already see coming on this where people are going to say, “Well, yes. But it's a multi-petabyte scale. Nobody's paying on-demand retail price.” And they're right. Most people who are transmitting that kind of data, have a specific discount rate applied to what they're doing that varies depending upon usage and use case.Sure, great. But I'm more concerned with the people who are sitting around dreaming up ideas for a company where I want to wind up doing some sort of streaming service. I talked to one of those companies very early on in my tenure as a consultant around the billing piece and they wanted me to check their napkin math because they thought that at their numbers when they wound up scaling up, if their projections were right, that they were going to be spending $65,000 a minute, and what did they not understand? And the answer was, well, you didn't understand this other thing, so it's going to be more than that, but no, you're directionally correct. So, that idea that started off on a napkin, of course, they didn't build it on top of AWS; they went elsewhere.And last time I checked, they'd raised well over a quarter-billion dollars in funding. So, that's a business that AWS would love to have on a variety of different levels, but they're never going to even be considered because by the time someone is at scale, they either have built this somewhere else or they went broke trying.Ben: Yep, absolutely. And we might just make the point there that while you can get discounts on data transfer, you really can't—or it's very rare—to get discounts on data processing for the NAT Gateway. So, any kind of savings you can get on data transfer would apply to a NAT instance solution, you know, saving you four-and-a-half cents per gigabyte inbound and outbound over the NAT Gateway equivalent solution. So, you're paying a lot for the benefit of a fully-managed service there. Very robust, nicely engineered fully-managed service as we've already acknowledged, but an extremely expensive solution for what it is, which is really just a proxy in the end. It doesn't add any value to you.Corey: The only way to make that more expensive would be to route it through something like Splunk or whatnot. And Splunk does an awful lot for what they charge per gigabyte, but it just feels like it's rent-seeking in some of the worst ways possible. And what I love about this is that you've solved the problem in a way that is open-source, you have already released it in Terraform code. I think one of the first to-dos on this for someone is going to be, okay now also make it CloudFormation and also make it CDK so you can drop it in however you want.And anyone can use this. I think the biggest mistake people might make in glancing at this is well, I'm looking at the hourly charge for the NAT Gateways and that's 32-and-a-half bucks a month and the instances that you recommend are hundreds of dollars a month for the big network-optimized stuff. Yeah, if you care about the hourly rate of either of those two things, this is not for you. That is not the problem that it solves. If you're an independent learner annoyed about the $30 charge you got for a Managed NAT Gateway, don't do this. This will only add to your billing concerns.Where it really shines is once you're at, I would say probably about ten terabytes a month, give or take, in Managed NAT Gateway data processing is where it starts to consider this. The breakeven is around six or so but there is value to not having to think about things. Once you get to that level of spend, though it's worth devoting a little bit of infrastructure time to something like this.Ben: Yeah, that's effectively correct. The total cost of running the solution, like, all-in, there's eight Elastic IPs, four NAT Gateways, if you're—say you're four zones; could be less if you're in fewer zones—like, n NAT Gateways, n NAT instances, depending on how many zones you're in, and I think that's about it. And I said right in the documentation, if any of those baseline fees are a material number for your use case, then this is probably not the right solution. Because we're talking about saving thousands of dollars. Any of these small numbers for NAT Gateway hourly costs, NAT instance hourly costs, that shouldn't be a factor, basically.Corey: Yeah, it's like when I used to worry about costing my customers a few tens of dollars in Cost Explorer or CloudWatch or request fees against S3 for their Cost and Usage Reports. It's yeah, that does actually have a cost, there's no real way around it, but look at the savings they're realizing by going through that. Yeah, they're not going to come back and complaining about their five-figure consulting engagement costing an additional $25 in AWS charges and then lowering it by a third. So, there's definitely a difference as far as how those things tend to be perceived. But it's easy to miss the big stuff when chasing after the little stuff like that.This is part of the problem I have with an awful lot of cost tooling out there. They completely ignore cost components like this and focus only on the things that are easy to query via API, of, oh, we're going to cost-optimize your Kubernetes cluster when they think about compute and RAM. And, okay, that's great, but you're completely ignoring all the data transfer because there's still no great way to get at that programmatically. And it really is missing the forest for the trees.Ben: I think this is key to any cost reduction project or program that you're undertaking. When you look at a bill, look for the biggest spend items first and work your way down from there, just because of the impact you can have. And that's exactly what I did in this project. I saw that ‘EC2 Other' slash NAT Gateway was the big item and I started brainstorming ways that we could go about addressing that. And now I have my next targets in mind now that we've reduced this cost to effectively… nothing, extremely low compared to what it was, we have other new line items on our bill that we can start optimizing. But in any cost project, start with the big things.Corey: You have come a long way around to answer a question I get asked a lot, which is, “How do I become a cloud economist?” And my answer is, you don't. It's something that happens to you. And it appears to be happening to you, too. My favorite part about the solution that you built, incidentally, is that it is being released under the auspices of your employer, Chime Financial, which is immune to being acquired by Amazon just to kill this thing and shut it up.Because Amazon already has something shitty called Chime. They don't need to wind up launching something else or acquiring something else and ruining it because they have a Slack competitor of sorts called Amazon Chime. There's no way they could acquire you [unintelligible 00:27:45] going to get lost in the hallways.Ben: Well, I have confidence that Chime will be a good steward of the project. Chime's goal and mission as a company is to help everyone achieve financial peace of mind and we take that really seriously. We even apply it to ourselves and that was kind of the impetus behind developing this in the first place. You mentioned earlier we have Terraform support already and you're exactly right. I'd love to have CDK, CloudFormation, Pulumi supports, and other kinds of contributions are more than welcome from the community.So, if anybody feels like participating, if they see a feature that's missing, let's make this project the best that it can be. I suspect we can save many companies, hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. And this really feels like the right direction to go in.Corey: This is easily a multi-billion dollar savings opportunity, globally.Ben: That's huge. I would be flabbergasted if that was the outcome of this.Corey: The hardest part is reaching these people and getting them on board with the idea of handling this. And again, I think there's a lot of opportunity for the project to evolve in the sense of different settings depending upon risk tolerance. I can easily see a scenario where in the event of a disruption to the NAT instance, it fails over to the Managed NAT Gateway, but fail back becomes manual so you don't have a flapping route table back and forth or a [hold 00:29:05] downtime or something like that. Because again, in that scenario, the failure mode is just well, you're paying four-and-a-half cents per gigabyte for a while until you wind up figuring out what's going on as opposed to the failure mode of you wind up disrupting connections on an ongoing basis, and for some workloads, that's not tenable. This is absolutely, for the common case, the right path forward.Ben: Absolutely. I think it's an enterprise-grade solution and the more knobs and dials that we add to tweak to make it more robust or adaptable to different kinds of use cases, the best outcome here would actually be that the entire solution becomes irrelevant because AWS fixes the NAT Gateway pricing. If that happens, I will consider the project a great success.Corey: I will be doing backflips like you wouldn't believe. I would sing their praises day in, day out. I'm not saying reduce it to nothing, even. I'm not saying it adds no value. I would change the way that it's priced because honestly, the fact that I can run an EC2 instance and be charged $0 on a per-gigabyte basis, yeah, I would pay a premium on an hourly charge based upon traffic volumes, but don't meter per gigabyte. That's where it breaks down.Ben: Absolutely. And why is it additive to data transfer, also? Like, I remember first starting to use VPC when it was launched and reading about the NAT instance requirement and thinking, “Wait a minute. I have to pay this extra management and hourly fee just so my private hosts could reach the internet? That seems kind of janky.”And Amazon established a norm here because Azure and GCP both have their own equivalent of this now. This is a business choice. This is not a technical choice. They could just run this under the hood and not charge anybody for it or build in the cost and it wouldn't be this thing we have to think about.Corey: I almost hate to say it, but Oracle Cloud does, for free.Ben: Do they?Corey: It can be done. This is a business decision. It is not a technical capability issue where well, it does incur cost to run these things. I understand that and I'm not asking for things for free. I very rarely say that this is overpriced when I'm talking about AWS billing issues. I'm talking about it being unpredictable, I'm talking about it being impossible to see in advance, but the fact that it costs too much money is rarely my complaint. In this case, it costs too much money. Make it cost less.Ben: If I'm not mistaken. GCPs equivalent solution is the exact same price. It's also four-and-a-half cents per gigabyte. So, that shows you that there's business games being played here. Like, Amazon could get ahead and do right by the customer by dropping this to a much more reasonable price.Corey: I really want to thank you both for taking the time to speak with me and building this glorious, glorious thing. Where can we find it? And where can we find you?Ben: alternat.cloud is going to be the place to visit. It's on Chime's GitHub, which will be released by the time this podcast comes out. As for me, if you want to connect, I'm on Twitter. @iamthewhaley is my handle. And of course, I'm on LinkedIn.Corey: Links to all of that will be in the podcast notes. Ben, thank you so much for your time and your hard work.Ben: This was fun. Thanks, Corey.Corey: Ben Whaley, staff software engineer at Chime Financial, and AWS Community Hero. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry rant of a comment that I will charge you not only four-and-a-half cents per word to read, but four-and-a-half cents to reply because I am experimenting myself with being a rent-seeking schmuck.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

In this episode, Wes Lawson, General Manager at Jesse Brown's Outdoors and Co-Host of the Carolina Outdoors Podcast, joins us to share his story of leading student trips along the Appalachian Trail, through Belize, and throughout the mountains surrounding Lake Yojoa, Honduras during his time at Hampden-Sydney College.

If you've ever been fascinated by crystals, and how they can help your life, then do we have the Crystal Muse Show for You!   Today I'll be speaking with Heather Askinosie and Timmi Jandro, about everything crystals, and how to use them in everyday rituals to tune in to the real you!   Heather Askinosie and Timmi Jandro are the co-founders of Energy Muse, and the authors of an absolutely favorite new book of mine, Crystal Muse.   Crystal Muse Self-Improvement and Self-Help Topics Include: How did Heather get interested in stones? How did Heather & Timmi begin get interested in Crystals? What did the Big Island of Hawaii and the jungles of Belize have to do with learning about crystals? What were prosperity necklaces? How did they end up selling crystals to the Hollywood A List? Who were the flip-flop girls? How do we know crystals do anything? How do we use crystals in our daily lives? How do we choose a crystal? What's the importance of saging the home? How does one do a clearing? What are the most important things to know about sage? What's a space clearing ritual? What is Heather's favorite crystal? What is Timmi's favorite crystal? How do crystals help meditation? What are the benefits of shungite? How can you use shungite in your water? How can crystals help with EMF? How can clear quartz help us? How can hematite help kids? How can crystals help with prosperity? Which crystals are most important for prosperity? What are the benefits of Turquoise? What crystals help with pregnancy and conscious conception? How do we use crystals to remove negative energy? What are each of the crystals Heather and Timmi are wearing and what are the benefits of each one? Which are the most important crystals to have in our lives? How can crystals help our kids?   Visit: https://energymuse.com/    To find out more visit: https://amzn.to/3qULECz - Order Michael Sandler's book, "AWE, the Automatic Writing Experience" www.automaticwriting.com  - Automatic Writing Experience Course www.inspirenationuniversity.com - Michael Sandler's School of Mystics https://inspirenationshow.com/ ……. Follow Michael and Jessica's exciting journey and get even more great tools, tips, and behind-the-scenes access. Go to https://www.patreon.com/inspirenation   For free meditations, weekly tips, stories, and similar shows visit: https://inspirenationshow.com/   We've got NEW Merch! - https://teespring.com/stores/inspire-nation-store   Follow Inspire Nation, and the lives of Michael and Jessica, on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/InspireNationLive/   Find us on TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@inspirenationshow 

Mem Hoops-Damaria Franklin will not get a "waiver" to play for Penny from UIC coach...cont' from Hour 2/Deion Sanders/Les Smith joins live from Belize

This episode is all about ancient North AMerica... What was ancient North America like? Was there ancient civilisation in the land that is presently known as Canada, the USA, Mexico and the countries of Central America? The answer is YES. Yes, there were ancient civilisations in North America. Not just in Mexico and Guatemala or Belize but in the US and Canada too... #History#Ancient#Prehistory#Maya#Clovis#AztecLots to unpack here... Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Are you ready for a promotion or raise? What have you been doing to take control of your career and your success? Join me for Episode 36 with Tammy Alvarez, CEO/Founder of the Career Winners Circle. Tammy said goodbye to her C-level executive role on Wall Street to start a global coaching business while living in Belize! In this episode: How do you level up? When do you start? Redefining what success means to you. Checklist to know when it's time to move up. Understand where your opportunities are to grow. Finding the foundation for your brand - find skills that come natural to you and figure out skills that in high demand/short supply - be the go-to person Find internal advocates "Doing a good job isn't enough...and doesn't necessarily get you promoted" Taking on projects - what will make the biggest impact Build your personal brand, define your worth. Love every Monday morning again! CEO of your Career Learn more about Tammy and Career Winners Circle: https://careerwinnerscircle.com/ Tammy's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tammyalvarez/ Jess Get Hired: https://www.jessgethired.com/ All Links: https://linktr.ee/jessgethired --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/jessgethired/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jessgethired/support

As an investor, you don't want to put all your eggs in one basket because you just never know. And as you're scouting for options – think international diversification! In this episode, Erik Cabral speaks with real estate investor Mike Cobb of ECI Development. Working in Central and Latin America for almost 30 years now, Mike shares some great insights into international diversification and some things you need to consider if this is something you're interested in. Here are some power takeaways from today's conversation: Why a lot of people don't want to make decisions Why invest in Belize Why pick a good brand franchise (ex. Best Western, Marriott) How the cash flow works when you're investing overseas Other options for international diversification Episode Highlights: [23:57] Looking into Alternative Investment Opportunities Today, Belize is in an arbitrage situation where it has become popular enough to start to get a lot of travelers, but it doesn't have branded products yet. And Belize has mainstream tourists who are looking online for a brand. Mike saw this opportunity and that's why he decided to dive into the hospitality market. [34:51] Why Choose a Good Brand Franchise Owning a brand franchise like Marriott and Best Western means the property is 100% yours. You have the title to it and you can use it as a residence and live in it if you want. One of the best things about these brands too is their worldwide reservation system where they deliver heads on beds. [36:53] How Cash Flow Works in Overseas Investments It's hard to make leverage work in Latin America. Mike recommends against financing as an investment. If it's a lifestyle, say you're a retiree, and you want to move down then you can make a loan. But as a rental property, the best option is if you have properties in the U.S., you can pull equity out at a much lower rate and use that money as your leverage in Latin America. Resources Mentioned: https://www.ecidevelopment.com/ Email: cabral@ecidevelopment.com Entrepreneurs Circle podcast is an On Air Brands production. On Air Brands is one of the leaders for launch, production, and promotion of top-rated business and real estate investing podcasts. Reach out to On Air Brands here ---> info@onairbrands.com Learn more at: www.onairbrands.com Find and follow find Erik at: www.erikcabral.co Download Erik's FREE GUIDE to podcasting at: www.erikcabral.co/guide Check out this show and previous inspiring guests at Entrepreneurs Circle in Apple Podcasts. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/erikecabral/support

Dentists have a unique opportunity to minister to the dentally needy, both domestically and internationally. These opportunities enable us to honor Christ, who has called us to care for "the least of these" (Matthew 25:40), and our compassionate treatment can also open doors to tangibly communicating the love of Christ to our patients.

HOUSE OF HORROR [Shisha8 Lounge BELIZE] LIVE AUDIO - 10:30:22, 3.48 PM by Coppershot Music

Missionary Letter - Belize

Tim Butterly, Mike Figs and Kareem Green join Luis J. Gomez and they discuss the new Belize Luis, Kareem witnessing Luis freaking out on the street before the show, Natalie's first Skankfest, Luis' Belize trip and how it compares to Jamaica, Tim acting as the piñata during Ellismania at Skankfest, the husband who left his wife for her 18 year old daughter (Real Ass Dude of the Week), the House of Dragons finale (no spoilers, don't worry!), James Corden being rude to a restaurant server and so much more!(Air Date: October 25th, 2022)Support our sponsors!ZippixToothpicks.com - Click here and use the promo code: ASS10 to get 10% off your order!RockAuto.com - Go to Rock Auto for car parts at the best possible prices and let them know Real Ass Podcast sent you!Manscaped.com - Use the promo code: RealAss for 20% off your order!Submit your artwork via postal mail to:GaS Digital Networkc/o Real Ass Podcast151 1st Ave, #311New York, NY 10003Submit to be Luis' sparring partner by sending a video and your information to RealAssOfficial@gmail.com!Real Ass Podcast merchandise is available at https://podcastmerch.com/collections/real-ass-podcastYou can watch Real Ass Podcast LIVE for FREE every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 11am ET at GaSDigitalNetwork.com/LIVEOnce you're there you can sign up at GaSDigitalNetwork.com with promo code: RAP for a 7-day FREE trial with access to every Real Ass Podcast show ever recorded! On top of that you'll also have the same access to ALL the shows that GaS Digital Network has to offer!Follow the whole show on social media!Tim ButterlyTwitter: https://twitter.com/timbutterlyInstagram: https://instagram.com/timbutterlyTwitch: https://twitch.tv/timbutterlyPodcast YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWWVkovtAdBInrZ4CMfSAvQMike FigsTwitter: https://twitter.com/ComicMikeFigsInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/comicmikefigsTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@figgythekidKareem GreenTwitter: https://twitter.com/KareemGreenInstagram: https://instagram.com/KareemGreen21Luis J. GomezTwitter: https://twitter.com/luisjgomezInstagram: https://instagram.com/gomezcomedyYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/LuisJGomezComedyTwitch: https://www.twitch.tv/prrattlesnakeWebsite: https://www.luisofskanks.comZac AmicoTwitter: https://twitter.com/ZASpookShowInstagram: https://instagram.com/zacisnotfunnySee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Luis J. Gomez and Dave Smith are back and it's almost 80 percent about MMA. The guys discuss the UFC 280 main card and what's next for the fighters like Islam Makhachev, Charles Oliveira, Aljamain Sterling, T.J. Dillashaw, Sean O'Malley & Petr Yan. Luis tries to hijack the show with talks of Belize but Dave & Vic Mysterio aren't having it. And whatever happened to MC Skat Kat?October 26, 2022Support our sponsors!https://choq.com/ use promo code YOMMA for 35% offhttps://yokratom.com/ Check out Yo Kratom (the home of the $60 kilo) for all your kratom needs!Follow Luis & Dave on social media.Luis J. GomezTwitter: https://twitter.com/luisjgomezInstagram: https://instagram.com/gomezcomedyYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/LuisJGomezComedyTwitch: https://www.twitch.tv/prrattlesnakeWebsite: https://LuisOfSkanks.comDave SmithTwitter: https://twitter.com/ComicDaveSmithInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/theproblemd...GETTR: https://www.gettr.com/user/ComicDaveS...See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Today's convo with Abbiola Ballah (she/her) is E V E R Y T H I N G. She's a true bridge-builder and translator in every sense of the word. And her inclusive action consulting business's tagline, “Be part of the solution,” says it all.Tune in to hear us talk about…- Abbiola's experience from growing up in Trinidad to spending most of her adult years as an immigrant in Japan, Belize, and the U.S.- What it was like to leave home for Japan after a major loss in her family - How she realized that what she'd always been doing was inclusion work, even before she had the language for it- The ways that serving as an English language educator and working in international higher education showed her how much she cares about making everyone feel like they belong- The loneliness and the beauty of doing the “brave” thing and making different choices than the folks around you- Why inclusion is truly a journey, not a goal we achieveAnd more!Connect with Abbiola:- Book your free Taking Inclusive Action Clarity Call to determine where you are in your inclusion journey how Abbiola can support you moving forward.- Check out her website and join her email list to learn about her upcoming offers!- Follow her business on Instagram.- Connect with her on LinkedIn.Connect with Lauren:- Schedule a free Change Agent Support Call to learn whether community coaching, 1:1 support, and/or copywriting services from Lauren are a good fit to help you move your community change-making forward.- Join Lauren for her two-part workshop Boundaries for the Empathic, Neurodivergent, & Anxiously Attached — just in time for that year-end burn-out and holiday messiness.- Tune in to her new podcast, It's Not You, It's the System. - Lauren's on an Instagram break, but you can email her here. Connect with Tristan:- Check out Creating Safer Spaces: Embodying your Commitment to Trans Inclusion. This 12-hour online training to foster trans and queer competency kicks off in January 2023.- Reach out to Tristan to learn other ways they can support you as a digital strategist and equity-inclusion facilitator.- Follow Tristan on Instagram.Be sure to subscribe on Apple or Spotify, and leave us 5-star rating and review on Apple to help other folks find us.We'd also love for you to take a screenshot of where the episode resonates with you and tag us in your Instagram stories at @alltfinpodcast, @tristankatzcreative, and @laurenkayroberts.Here is a transcript of this recording.Thanks to Son of Nun and DJ Mentos for the music. You can find their work at sonofnun.bandcamp.com and djmentos.com.

Medical Tourism.  Fresh organic foods.  The Panama Canal.   If you've enjoyed the Country Spotlight series so far with episodes 44 on Belize and 52 on Nicaragua, you will want to listen in on today's spotlight: Panama.Our returning guest from Episode 13, Mikkel Thorup of Expat Money shares his personal experience having lived in Panama and what one can expect from this Central American country.

On this edition of SPORTS GOOFS presented by Mr. Tortilla: Try the Famous 1-Carb Tortilla in Multigrain or Pico de Gallo! Listen to us on Podhero! Support the Goofs on Patreon. Sports Goofs' Social Media: Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Discord | TikTok Francisco's Social Media: Twitter | YouTube Andrew's Social Media: Twitter | Twitch Charles' Social Media: Twitter Goof States of America (40.5): California, Virginia, Florida, Washington, New Jersey, Oregon, Ohio, Texas, New York, Illinois, Arizona, Michigan, Indiana, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Georgia, Montana, Delaware, Alabama, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Kentucky, Rhode Island, Utah, Kansas, Maryland, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Iowa, Colorado, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, Missouri, Idaho, New Mexico, Hawaii, District of Columbia, Oklahoma Goof World Order (57): USA, India, Canada, Ireland, Vietnam, Nepal, Singapore, Germany, France, United Kingdom, Italy, Israel, Finland, Pakistan, Brazil, Malaysia, Thailand, Egypt, Croatia, Norway, Puerto Rico, Belize, Oman, Japan, Kyrgyzstan, South Africa, Algeria, Australia, Bangladesh, Switzerland, Iran, Iraq, Sri Lanka, Morocco, Portugal, Nicaragua, Bahrain, Netherlands, New Zealand, Philippines, Bulgaria, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, China, Seychelles, Sweden, Spain, Serbia, Indonesia, Poland, Qatar, Lebanon, Czech Republic, South Korea, Russia, Taiwan, Tunisia #MLB #NBA #NHL #NFL #NCAA #WWE #AEW --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/sports-goofs/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/sports-goofs/support

Dr. Sara Flory joins us to discuss the article Challenges to Culturally Responsive Teaching in Physical Education Teacher Education Alumni: A Mixed-Methods Analysis. This article examined the culturally responsive teaching self-efficacy and barriers of graduates from a Physical Education Teacher Education program focusing on social justice issues. Full Cite: Flory, S. B., Nieman, C. V., & Wylie, R. C. (2022). Challenges to culturally responsive teaching in physical education teacher education alumni: A mixed-methods analysis. Journal of Teaching in Physical Education, 1(aop), 1-9. https://doi.org/10.1123/jtpe.2021-0312 Sara Twitter @saraflory Craig Twitter @Nieman_PE Some of the social justice in PETE (the rest can be found on Twitter @theHPEpodcast pinned tweet) https://anchor.fm/pwrhpe/episodes/210The-emotionality-of-whiteness-in-PETE-wDr--Mara-Simon-e1ctne6/a-a77uesq https://anchor.fm/pwrhpe/episodes/204-Experiential-Learning-of-University-Students-Delivering-a-Coaching-Workshop-in-Belize-e19lpu2/a-a6qld0f https://anchor.fm/pwrhpe/episodes/202Tribal-Critical-Race-Theory-and-Miami-Universitys-Myaamia-Heritage-Logo-e19pgb5/a-a6r577f Self-efficacy podcasts https://anchor.fm/pwrhpe/episodes/206-Self-Efficacy-Theory-wDr--Jenn-Jacobs-Theory-Breakdown-e1bvt2p/a-a74lj55 https://anchor.fm/pwrhpe/episodes/207-SelfEfficacy-Experiences-of-Graduate-Students-Working-in-a-Sportbased-Leadership-Program-at-a-Youth-Prison-e1bvt68/a-a74ljkv --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/pwrhpe/support

Despite the recognition that successful mentoring experiences are usually the result of intentional and committed relationships between mentor and mentee, there are still challenges in achieving consistent, positive outcomes for mission driven Christ followers in healthcare. Healthcare missionaries, whether domestic or foreign, face unexpected challenges, failures, and disappointments, both on and off the field of service, across a broad spectrum of life, work, and ministry. This talk will focus on the essential commitments of both mentor and mentee during the early career of cross-cultural workers who serve in diverse living and working environments.

In this first international podcast episode of Rude University we sit down with a brilliant Belize native by the name of Khalifa (named after the tallest building in the world) to discuss the opportunities of Belize, the unapologetic ego of Americans and overall life in Belize. Follow us on this journey as Rude University ventures to become a internationally recognized podcast! The host: @smittyrude28 The Professor for this episode: @khalmc7

Dr Aileen Hale, one of our English Teachers at Platzi believes in the power of the Education to transform the world. She's taught in countries such as Belize, Cuba, Mexico, Colombia, Albania, Indonesia and many more; and in this podcast, she shares her story. Enjoy it and keep practicing your English at platzi.com/teacheraileen and join our international community at platzi.com/discord.

Question Timestamps: Emelyn, Facebook (4:09) - What are your views on different translations of the Bible? Roger, ME (7:13) - What bible verses or passages can best help people who are confused about their gender? Robert, HI (15:35) - How do people have eternal life when Jesus says that anyone who hates his brother in Christ will not have eternal life? Cheyenne, NY (20:34) - What can I share at a funeral I'm attending? Lori, NY (33:45) - I'm 58, and I've been praying to find a godly husband and it hasn't happened. Should I stop praying for this? Marcelino, HI (39:04) - Is Halloween of the devil? Should christians celebrate Halloween? Grace, NJ (41:56) - Did God ask Hosea to marry a prostitute and why? What is the connection to Israel and the prophets? Anita, Belize (44:29) - Can a Christian unknowingly be used by Satan? Christine, NJ (46:34) - Why did Joseph marry an Egyptian wife, and not at least question it? Anonymous, NY (48:44) - How do I tell my wife about my past acts of adultery? Brian, MA (53:31) - Why wouldn't God let Moses in the promised land?   Questions? 888-712-7434 Questions@bbtlive.org

About RichardRichard "RichiH" Hartmann is the Director of Community at Grafana Labs, Prometheus team member, OpenMetrics founder, OpenTelemetry member, CNCF Technical Advisory Group Observability chair, CNCF Technical Oversight Committee member, CNCF Governing Board member, and more. He also leads, organizes, or helps run various conferences from hundreds to 18,000 attendess, including KubeCon, PromCon, FOSDEM, DENOG, DebConf, and Chaos Communication Congress. In the past, he made mainframe databases work, ISP backbones run, kept the largest IRC network on Earth running, and designed and built a datacenter from scratch. Go through his talks, podcasts, interviews, and articles at https://github.com/RichiH/talks or follow him on Twitter at https://twitter.com/TwitchiH for musings on the intersection of technology and society.Links Referenced: Grafana Labs: https://grafana.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/TwitchiH Richard Hartmann list of talks: https://github.com/richih/talks TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at AWS AppConfig. Engineers love to solve, and occasionally create, problems. But not when it's an on-call fire-drill at 4 in the morning. Software problems should drive innovation and collaboration, NOT stress, and sleeplessness, and threats of violence. That's why so many developers are realizing the value of AWS AppConfig Feature Flags. Feature Flags let developers push code to production, but hide that that feature from customers so that the developers can release their feature when it's ready. This practice allows for safe, fast, and convenient software development. You can seamlessly incorporate AppConfig Feature Flags into your AWS or cloud environment and ship your Features with excitement, not trepidation and fear. To get started, go to snark.cloud/appconfig. That's snark.cloud/appconfig.Corey: This episode is brought to us in part by our friends at Datadog. Datadog's SaaS monitoring and security platform that enables full stack observability for developers, IT operations, security, and business teams in the cloud age. Datadog's platform, along with 500 plus vendor integrations, allows you to correlate metrics, traces, logs, and security signals across your applications, infrastructure, and third party services in a single pane of glass.Combine these with drag and drop dashboards and machine learning based alerts to help teams troubleshoot and collaborate more effectively, prevent downtime, and enhance performance and reliability. Try Datadog in your environment today with a free 14 day trial and get a complimentary T-shirt when you install the agent.To learn more, visit datadoghq/screaminginthecloud to get. That's www.datadoghq/screaminginthecloudCorey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud, I'm Corey Quinn. There are an awful lot of people who are incredibly good at understanding the ins and outs and the intricacies of the observability world. But they didn't have time to come on the show today. Instead, I am talking to my dear friend of two decades now, Richard Hartmann, better known on the internet as RichiH, who is the Director of Community at Grafana Labs, here to suffer—in a somewhat atypical departure for the theme of this show—personal attacks for once. Richie, thank you for joining me.Richard: And thank you for agreeing on personal attacks.Corey: Exactly. It was one of your riders. Like, there have to be the personal attacks back and forth or you refuse to appear on the show. You've been on before. In fact, the last time we did a recording, I believe you were here in person, which was a long time ago. What have you been up to?You're still at Grafana Labs. And in many cases, I would point out that, wow, you've been there for many years; that seems to be an atypical thing, which is an American tech industry perspective because every time you and I talk about this, you look at folks who—wow, you were only at that company for five years. What's wrong with you—you tend to take the longer view and I tend to have the fast twitch, time to go ahead and leave jobs because it's been more than 20 minutes approach. I see that you're continuing to live what you preach, though. How's it been?Richard: Yeah, so there's a little bit of Covid brains, I think. When we talked in 2018, I was still working at SpaceNet, building a data center. But the last two-and-a-half years didn't really happen for many people, myself included. So, I guess [laugh] that includes you.Corey: No, no you're right. You've only been at Grafana Labs a couple of years. One would think I would check the notes for shooting my mouth off. But then, one wouldn't know me.Richard: What notes? Anyway, I've been around Prometheus and Grafana Since 2015. But it's like, real, full-time everything is 2020. There was something in between. Since 2018, I contracted to do vulnerability handling and everything for Grafana Labs because they had something and they didn't know how to deal with it.But no, full time is 2020. But as to the space in the [unintelligible 00:02:45] of itself, it's maybe a little bit German of me, but trying to understand the real world and trying to get an overview of systems and how they actually work, and if they are working correctly and as intended, and if not, how they're not working as intended, and how to fix this is something which has always been super important to me, in part because I just want to understand the world. And this is a really, really good way to automate understanding of the world. So, it's basically a work-saving mechanism. And that's why I've been sticking to it for so long, I guess.Corey: Back in the early days of monitoring systems—so we called it monitoring back then because, you know, are using simple words that lack nuance was sort of de rigueur back then—we wound up effectively having tools. Nagios is the one that springs to mind, and it was terrible in all the ways you would expect a tool written in janky Perl in the early-2000s to be. But it told you what was going on. It tried to do a thing, generally reach a server or query it about things, and when things fell out of certain specs, it screamed its head off, which meant that when you had things like the core switch melting down—thinking of one very particular incident—you didn't get a Nagios alert; you got 4000 Nagios alerts. But start to finish, you could wrap your head rather fully around what Nagios did and why it did the sometimes strange things that it did.These days, when you take a look at Prometheus, which we hear a lot about, particularly in the Kubernetes space and Grafana, which is often mentioned in the same breath, it's never been quite clear to me exactly where those start and stop. It always feels like it's a component in a larger system to tell you what's going on rather than a one-stop shop that's going to, you know, shriek its head off when something breaks in the middle of the night. Is that the right way to think about it? The wrong way to think about it?Richard: It's a way to think about it. So personally, I use the terms monitoring and observability pretty much interchangeably. Observability is a relatively well-defined term, even though most people won't agree. But if you look back into the '70s into control theory where the term is coming from, it is the measure of how much you're able to determine the internal state of a system by looking at its inputs and its outputs. Depending on the definition, some people don't include the inputs, but that is the OG definition as far as I'm aware.And from this, there flow a lot of things. This question of—or this interpretation of the difference between telling that, yes, something's broken versus why something's broken. Or if you can't ask new questions on the fly, it's not observability. Like all of those things are fundamentally mapped to this definition of, I need enough data to determine the internal state of whatever system I have just by looking at what is coming in, what is going out. And that is at the core the thing. Now, obviously, it's become a buzzword, which is oftentimes the fate of successful things. So, it's become a buzzword, and you end up with cargo culting.Corey: I would argue periodically, that observability is hipster monitoring. If you call it monitoring, you get yelled at by Charity Majors. Which is tongue and cheek, but she has opinions, made, nonetheless shall I say, frustrating by the fact that she is invariably correct in those opinions, which just somehow makes it so much worse. It would be easy to dismiss things she says if she weren't always right. And the world is changing, especially as we get into the world of distributed systems.Is the server that runs the app working or not working loses meaning when we're talking about distributed systems, when we're talking about containers running on top of Kubernetes, which turns every outage into a murder mystery. We start having distributed applications composed of microservices, so you have no idea necessarily where an issue is. Okay, is this one microservice having an issue related to the request coming into a completely separate microservice? And it seems that for those types of applications, the answer has been tracing for a long time now, where originally that was something that felt like it was sprung, fully-formed from the forehead of some God known as one of the hyperscalers, but now is available to basically everyone, in theory.In practice, it seems that instrumenting applications still one of the hardest parts of all of this. I tried hooking up one of my own applications to be observed via OTEL, the open telemetry project, and it turns out that right now, OTEL and AWS Lambda have an intersection point that makes everything extremely difficult to work with. It's not there yet; it's not baked yet. And someday, I hope that changes because I would love to interchangeably just throw metrics and traces and logs to all the different observability tools and see which ones work, which ones don't, but that still feels very far away from current state of the art.Richard: Before we go there, maybe one thing which I don't fully agree with. You said that previously, you were told if a service up or down, that's the thing which you cared about, and I don't think that's what people actually cared about. At that time, also, what they fundamentally cared about: is the user-facing service up, or down, or impacted? Is it slow? Does it return errors every X percent for requests, something like this?Corey: Is the site up? And—you're right, I was hand-waving over a whole bunch of things. It was, “Okay. First, the web server is returning a page, yes or no? Great. Can I ping the server?” Okay, well, there are ways of server can crash and still leave enough of the TCP/IP stack up or it can respond to pings and do little else.And then you start adding things to it. But the Nagios thing that I always wanted to add—and had to—was, is the disk full? And that was annoying. And, on some level, like, why should I care in the modern era how much stuff is on the disk because storage is cheap and free and plentiful? The problem is, after the third outage in a month because the disk filled up, you start to not have a good answer for well, why aren't you monitoring whether the disk is full?And that was the contributors to taking down the server. When the website broke, there were what felt like a relatively small number of reasonably well-understood contributors to that at small to midsize applications, which is what I'm talking about, the only things that people would let me touch. I wasn't running hyperscale stuff where you have a fleet of 10,000 web servers and, “Is the server up?” Yeah, in that scenario, no one cares. But when we're talking about the database server and the two application servers and the four web servers talking to them, you think about it more in terms of pets than you do cattle.Richard: Yes, absolutely. Yet, I think that was a mistake back then, and I tried to do it differently, as a specific example with the disk. And I'm absolutely agreeing that previous generation tools limit you in how you can actually work with your data. In particular, once you're with metrics where you can do actual math on the data, it doesn't matter if the disk is almost full. It matters if that disk is going to be full within X amount of time.If that disk is 98% full and it sits there at 98% for ten years and provides the service, no one cares. The thing is, will it actually run out in the next two hours, in the next five hours, what have you. Depending on this, is this currently or imminently a customer-impacting or user-impacting then yes, alert on it, raise hell, wake people, make them fix it, as opposed to this thing can be dealt with during business hours on the next workday. And you don't have to wake anyone up.Corey: Yeah. The big filer with massive amounts of storage has crossed the 70% line. Okay, now it's time to start thinking about that, what do you want to do? Maybe it's time to order another shelf of discs for it, which is going to take some time. That's a radically different scenario than the 20 gigabyte root volume on your server just started filling up dramatically; the rate of change is such that'll be full in 20 minutes.Yeah, one of those is something you want to wake people up for. Generally speaking, you don't want to wake people up for what is fundamentally a longer-term strategic business problem. That can be sorted out in the light of day versus, “[laugh] we're not going to be making money in two hours, so if I don't wake up and fix this now.” That's the kind of thing you generally want to be woken up for. Well, let's be honest, you don't want that to happen at all, but if it does happen, you kind of want to know in advance rather than after the fact.Richard: You're literally describing linear predict from Prometheus, which is precisely for this, where I can look back over X amount of time and make a linear prediction because everything else breaks down at scale, blah, blah, blah, to detail. But the thing is, I can draw a line with my pencil by hand on my data and I can predict when is this thing going to it. Which is obviously precisely correct if I have a TLS certificate. It's a little bit more hand-wavy when it's a disk. But still, you can look into the future and you say, “What will be happening if current trends for the last X amount of time continue in Y amount of time.” And that's precisely a thing where you get this more powerful ability of doing math with your data.Corey: See, when you say it like that, it sounds like it actually is a whole term of art, where you're focusing on an in-depth field, where salaries are astronomical. Whereas the tools that I had to talk about this stuff back in the day made me sound like, effectively, the sysadmin that I was grunting and pointing: “This is gonna fill up.” And that is how I thought about it. And this is the challenge where it's easy to think about these things in narrow, defined contexts like that, but at scale, things break.Like the idea of anomaly detection. Well, okay, great if normally, the CPU and these things are super bored and suddenly it gets really busy, that's atypical. Maybe we should look into it, assuming that it has a challenge. The problem is, that is a lot harder than it sounds because there are so many factors that factor into it. And as soon as you have something, quote-unquote, “Intelligent,” making decisions on this, it doesn't take too many false positives before you start ignoring everything it has to say, and missing legitimate things. It's this weird and obnoxious conflation of both hard technical problems and human psychology.Richard: And the breaking up of old service boundaries. Of course, when you say microservices, and such, fundamentally, functionally a microservice or nanoservice, picoservice—but the pendulum is already swinging back to larger units of complexity—but it fundamentally does not make any difference if I have a monolith on some mainframe or if I have a bunch of microservices. Yes, I can scale differently, I can scale horizontally a lot more easily, vertically, it's a little bit harder, blah, blah, blah, but fundamentally, the logic and the complexity, which is being packaged is fundamentally the same. More users, everything, but it is fundamentally the same. What's happening again, and again, is I'm breaking up those old boundaries, which means the old tools which have assumptions built in about certain aspects of how I can actually get an overview of a system just start breaking down, when my complexity unit or my service or what have I, is usually congruent with a physical piece, of hardware or several services are congruent with that piece of hardware, it absolutely makes sense to think about things in terms of this one physical server. The fact that you have different considerations in cloud, and microservices, and blah, blah, blah, is not inherently that it is more complex.On the contrary, it is fundamentally the same thing. It scales with users' everything, but it is fundamentally the same thing, but I have different boundaries of where I put interfaces onto my complexity, which basically allow me to hide all of this complexity from the downstream users.Corey: That's part of the challenge that I think we're grappling with across this entire industry from start to finish. Where we originally looked at these things and could reason about it because it's the computer and I know how those things work. Well, kind of, but okay, sure. But then we start layering levels of complexity on top of layers of complexity on top of layers of complexity, and suddenly, when things stop working the way that we expect, it can be very challenging to unpack and understand why. One of the ways I got into this whole space was understanding, to some degree, of how system calls work, of how the kernel wound up interacting with userspace, about how Linux systems worked from start to finish. And these days, that isn't particularly necessary most of the time for the care and feeding of applications.The challenge is when things start breaking, suddenly having that in my back pocket to pull out could be extremely handy. But I don't think it's nearly as central as it once was and I don't know that I would necessarily advise someone new to this space to spend a few years as a systems person, digging into a lot of those aspects. And this is why you need to know what inodes are and how they work. Not really, not anymore. It's not front and center the way that it once was, in most environments, at least in the world that I live in. Agree? Disagree?Richard: Agreed. But it's very much unsurprising. You probably can't tell me how to precisely grow sugar cane or corn, you can't tell me how to refine the sugar out of it, but you can absolutely bake a cake. But you will not be able to tell me even a third of—and I'm—for the record, I'm also not able to tell you even a third about the supply chain which just goes from I have a field and some seeds and I need to have a package of refined sugar—you're absolutely enabled to do any of this. The thing is, you've been part of the previous generation of infrastructure where you know how this underlying infrastructure works, so you have more ability to reason about this, but it's not needed for cloud services nearly as much.You need different types of skill sets, but that doesn't mean the old skill set is completely useless, at least not as of right now. It's much more a case of you need fewer of those people and you need them in different places because those things have become infrastructure. Which is basically the cloud play, where a lot of this is just becoming infrastructure more and more.Corey: Oh, yeah. Back then I distinctly remember my elders looking down their noses at me because I didn't know assembly, and how could I possibly consider myself a competent systems admin if I didn't at least have a working knowledge of assembly? Or at least C, which I, over time, learned enough about to know that I didn't want to be a C programmer. And you're right, this is the value of cloud and going back to those days getting a web server up and running just to compile Apache's httpd took a week and an in-depth knowledge of GCC flags.And then in time, oh, great. We're going to have rpm or debs. Great, okay, then in time, you have apt, if you're in the dev land because I know you are a Debian developer, but over in Red Hat land, we had yum and other tools. And then in time, it became oh, we can just use something like Puppet or Chef to wind up ensuring that thing is installed. And then oh, just docker run. And now it's a checkbox in a web console for S3.These things get easier with time and step by step by step we're standing on the shoulders of giants. Even in the last ten years of my career, I used to have a great challenge question that I would interview people with of, “Do you know what TinyURL is? It takes a short URL and then expands it to a longer one. Great, on the whiteboard, tell me how you would implement that.” And you could go up one side and down the other, and then you could add constraints, multiple data centers, now one goes offline, how do you not lose data? Et cetera, et cetera.But these days, there are so many ways to do that using cloud services that it almost becomes trivial. It's okay, multiple data centers, API Gateway, a Lambda, and a global DynamoDB table. Now, what? “Well, now it gets slow. Why is it getting slow?”“Well, in that scenario, probably because of something underlying the cloud provider.” “And so now, you lose an entire AWS region. How do you handle that?” “Seems to me when that happens, the entire internet's kind of broken. Do people really need longer URLs?”And that is a valid answer, in many cases. The question doesn't really work without a whole bunch of additional constraints that make it sound fake. And that's not a weakness. That is the fact that computers and cloud services have never been as accessible as they are now. And that's a win for everyone.Richard: There's one aspect of accessibility which is actually decreasing—or two. A, you need to pay for them on an ongoing basis. And B, you need an internet connection which is suitably fast, low latency, what have you. And those are things which actually do make things harder for a variety of reasons. If I look at our back-end systems—as in Grafana—all of them have single binary modes where you literally compile everything into a single binary and you can run it on your laptop because if you're stuck on a plane, you can't do any work on it. That kind of is not the best of situations.And if you have a huge CI/CD pipeline, everything in this cloud and fine and dandy, but your internet breaks. Yeah, so I do agree that it is becoming generally more accessible. I disagree that it is becoming more accessible along all possible axes.Corey: I would agree. There is a silver lining to that as well, where yes, they are fraught and dangerous and I would preface this with a whole bunch of warnings, but from a cost perspective, all of the cloud providers do have a free tier offering where you can kick the tires on a lot of these things in return for no money. Surprisingly, the best one of those is Oracle Cloud where they have an unlimited free tier, use whatever you want in this subset of services, and you will never be charged a dime. As opposed to the AWS model of free tier where well, okay, it suddenly got very popular or you misconfigured something, and surprise, you now owe us enough money to buy Belize. That doesn't usually lead to a great customer experience.But you're right, you can't get away from needing an internet connection of at least some level of stability and throughput in order for a lot of these things to work. The stuff you would do locally on a Raspberry Pi, for example, if your budget constrained and want to get something out here, or your laptop. Great, that's not going to work in the same way as a full-on cloud service will.Richard: It's not free unless you have hard guarantees that you're not going to ever pay anything. It's fine to send warning, it's fine to switch the thing off, it's fine to have you hit random hard and soft quotas. It is not a free service if you can't guarantee that it is free.Corey: I agree with you. I think that there needs to be a free offering where, “Well, okay, you want us to suddenly stop serving traffic to the world?” “Yes. When the alternative is you have to start charging me through the nose, yes I want you to stop serving traffic.” That is definitionally what it says on the tin.And as an independent learner, that is what I want. Conversely, if I'm an enterprise, yeah, I don't care about money; we're running our Superbowl ad right now, so whatever you do, don't stop serving traffic. Charge us all the money. And there's been a lot of hand wringing about, well, how do we figure out which direction to go in? And it's, have you considered asking the customer?So, on a scale of one to bank, how serious is this account going to be [laugh]? Like, what are your big concerns: never charge me or never go down? Because we can build for either of those. Just let's make sure that all of those expectations are aligned. Because if you guess you're going to get it wrong and then no one's going to like you.Richard: I would argue this. All those services from all cloud providers actually build to address both of those. It's a deliberate choice not to offer certain aspects.Corey: Absolutely. When I talk to AWS, like, “Yeah, but there is an eventual consistency challenge in the billing system where it takes”—as anyone who's looked at the billing system can see—“Multiple days, sometimes for usage data to show up. So, how would we be able to stop things if the usage starts climbing?” To which my relatively direct responses, that sounds like a huge problem. I don't know how you'd fix that, but I do know that if suddenly you decide, as a matter of policy, to okay, if you're in the free tier, we will not charge you, or even we will not charge you more than $20 a month.So, you build yourself some headroom, great. And anything that people are able to spin up, well, you're just going to have to eat the cost as a provider. I somehow suspect that would get fixed super quickly if that were the constraint. The fact that it isn't is a conscious choice.Richard: Absolutely.Corey: And the reason I'm so passionate about this, about the free space, is not because I want to get a bunch of things for free. I assure you I do not. I mean, I spend my life fixing AWS bills and looking at AWS pricing, and my argument is very rarely, “It's too expensive.” It's that the billing dimension is hard to predict or doesn't align with a customer's experience or prices a service out of a bunch of use cases where it'll be great. But very rarely do I just sit here shaking my fist and saying, “It costs too much.”The problem is when you scare the living crap out of a student with a surprise bill that's more than their entire college tuition, even if you waive it a week or so later, do you think they're ever going to be as excited as they once were to go and use cloud services and build things for themselves and see what's possible? I mean, you and I met on IRC 20 years ago because back in those days, the failure mode and the risk financially was extremely low. It's yeah, the biggest concern that I had back then when I was doing some of my Linux experimentation is if I typed the wrong thing, I'm going to break my laptop. And yeah, that happened once or twice, and I've learned not to make those same kinds of mistakes, or put guardrails in so the blast radius was smaller, or use a remote system instead. Yeah, someone else's computer that I can destroy. Wonderful. But that was on we live and we learn as we were coming up. There was never an opportunity for us, to my understanding, to wind up accidentally running up an $8 million charge.Richard: Absolutely. And psychological safety is one of the most important things in what most people do. We are social animals. Without this psychological safety, you're not going to have long-term, self-sustaining groups. You will not make someone really excited about it. There's two basic ways to sell: trust or force. Those are the two ones. There's none else.Corey: Managing shards. Maintenance windows. Overprovisioning. ElastiCache bills. I know, I know. It's a spooky season and you're already shaking. It's time for caching to be simpler. Momento Serverless Cache lets you forget the backend to focus on good code and great user experiences. With true autoscaling and a pay-per-use pricing model, it makes caching easy. No matter your cloud provider, get going for free at gomemento.co/screaming That's GO M-O-M-E-N-T-O dot co slash screamingCorey: Yeah. And it also looks ridiculous. I was talking to someone somewhat recently who's used to spending four bucks a month on their AWS bill for some S3 stuff. Great. Good for them. That's awesome. Their credentials got compromised. Yes, that is on them to some extent. Okay, great.But now after six days, they were told that they owed $360,000 to AWS. And I don't know how, as a cloud company, you can sit there and ask a student to do that. That is not a realistic thing. They are what is known, in the United States at least, in the world of civil litigation as quote-unquote, “Judgment proof,” which means, great, you could wind up finding that someone owes you $20 billion. Most of the time, they don't have that, so you're not able to recoup it. Yeah, the judgment feels good, but you're never going to see it.That's the problem with something like that. It's yeah, I would declare bankruptcy long before, as a student, I wound up paying that kind of money. And I don't hear any stories about them releasing the collection agency hounds against people in that scenario. But I couldn't guarantee that. I would never urge someone to ignore that bill and see what happens.And it's such an off-putting thing that, from my perspective, is beneath of the company. And let's be clear, I see this behavior at times on Google Cloud, and I see it on Azure as well. This is not something that is unique to AWS, but they are the 800-pound gorilla in the space, and that's important. Or as I just to mention right now, like, as I—because I was about to give you crap for this, too, but if I go to grafana.com, it says, and I quote, “Play around with the Grafana Stack. Experience Grafana for yourself, no registration or installation needed.”Good. I was about to yell at you if it's, “Oh, just give us your credit card and go ahead and start spinning things up and we won't charge you. Honest.” Even your free account does not require a credit card; you're doing it right. That tells me that I'm not going to get a giant surprise bill.Richard: You have no idea how much thought and work went into our free offering. There was a lot of math involved.Corey: None of this is easy, I want to be very clear on that. Pricing is one of the hardest things to get right, especially in cloud. And it also, when you get it right, it doesn't look like it was that hard for you to do. But I fix [sigh] I people's AWS bills for a living and still, five or six years in, one of the hardest things I still wrestle with is pricing engagements. It's incredibly nuanced, incredibly challenging, and at least for services in the cloud space where you're doing usage-based billing, that becomes a problem.But glancing at your pricing page, you do hit the two things that are incredibly important to me. The first one is use something for free. As an added bonus, you can use it forever. And I can get started with it right now. Great, when I go and look at your pricing page or I want to use your product and it tells me to ‘click here to contact us.' That tells me it's an enterprise sales cycle, it's got to be really expensive, and I'm not solving my problem tonight.Whereas the other side of it, the enterprise offering needs to be ‘contact us' and you do that, that speaks to the enterprise procurement people who don't know how to sign a check that doesn't have to commas in it, and they want to have custom terms and all the rest, and they're prepared to pay for that. If you don't have that, you look to small-time. When it doesn't matter what price you put on it, you wind up offering your enterprise tier at some large number, it's yeah, for some companies, that's a small number. You don't necessarily want to back yourself in, depending upon what the specific needs are. You've gotten that right.Every common criticism that I have about pricing, you folks have gotten right. And I definitely can pick up on your fingerprints on a lot of this. Because it sounds like a weird thing to say of, “Well, he's the Director of Community, why would he weigh in on pricing?” It's, “I don't think you understand what community is when you ask that question.”Richard: Yes, I fully agree. It's super important to get pricing right, or to get many things right. And usually the things which just feel naturally correct are the ones which took the most effort and the most time and everything. And yes, at least from the—like, I was in those conversations or part of them, and the one thing which was always clear is when we say it's free, it must be free. When we say it is forever free, it must be forever free. No games, no lies, do what you say and say what you do. Basically.We have things where initially you get certain pro features and you can keep paying and you can keep using them, or after X amount of time they go away. Things like these are built in because that's what people want. They want to play around with the whole thing and see, hey, is this actually providing me value? Do I want to pay for this feature which is nice or this and that plugin or what have you? And yeah, you're also absolutely right that once you leave these constraints of basically self-serve cloud, you are talking about bespoke deals, but you're also talking about okay, let's sit down, let's actually understand what your business is: what are your business problems? What are you going to solve today? What are you trying to solve tomorrow?Let us find a way of actually supporting you and invest into a mutual partnership and not just grab the money and run. We have extremely low churn for, I would say, pretty good reasons. Because this thing about our users, our customers being successful, we do take it extremely seriously.Corey: It's one of those areas that I just can't shake the feeling is underappreciated industry-wide. And the reason I say that this is your fingerprints on it is because if this had been wrong, you have a lot of… we'll call them idiosyncrasies, where there are certain things you absolutely will not stand for, and misleading people and tricking them into paying money is high on that list. One of the reasons we're friends. So yeah, but I say I see your fingerprints on this, it's yeah, if this hadn't been worked out the way that it is, you would not still be there. One other thing that I wanted to call out about, well, I guess it's a confluence of pricing and logging in the rest, I look at your free tier, and it offers up to 50 gigabytes of ingest a month.And it's easy for me to sit here and compare that to other services, other tools, and other logging stories, and then I have to stop and think for a minute that yeah, discs have gotten way bigger, and internet connections have gotten way faster, and even the logs have gotten way wordier. I still am not sure that most people can really contextualize just how much logging fits into 50 gigs of data. Do you have any, I guess, ballpark examples of what that looks like? Because it's been long enough since I've been playing in these waters that I can't really contextualize it anymore.Richard: Lord of the Rings is roughly five megabytes. It's actually less. So, we're talking literally 10,000 Lord of the Rings, which you can just shove in us and we're just storing this for you. Which also tells you that you're not going to be reading any of this. Or some of it, yes, but not all of it. You need better tooling and you need proper tooling.And some of this is more modern. Some of this is where we actually pushed the state of the art. But I'm also biased. But I, for myself, do claim that we did push the state of the art here. But at the same time you come back to those absolute fundamentals of how humans deal with data.If you look back basically as far as we have writing—literally 6000 years ago, is the oldest writing—humans have always dealt with information with the state of the world in very specific ways. A, is it important enough to even write it down, to even persist it in whatever persistence mechanisms I have at my disposal? If yes, write a detailed account or record a detailed account of whatever the thing is. But it turns out, this is expensive and it's not what you need. So, over time, you optimize towards only taking down key events and only noting key events. Maybe with their interconnections, but fundamentally, the key events.As your data grows, as you have more stuff, as this still is important to your business and keeps being more important to—or doesn't even need to be a business; can be social, can be whatever—whatever thing it is, it becomes expensive, again, to retain all of those key events. So, you turn them into numbers and you can do actual math on them. And that's this path which you've seen again, and again, and again, and again, throughout humanity's history. Literally, as long as we have written records, this has played out again, and again, and again, and again, for every single field which humans actually cared about. At different times, like, power networks are way ahead of this, but fundamentally power networks work on metrics, but for transient load spike, and everything, they have logs built into their power measurement devices, but those are only far in between. Of course, the main thing is just metrics, time-series. And you see this again, and again.You also were sysadmin in internet-related all switches have been metrics-based or metrics-first for basically forever, for 20, 30 years. But that stands to reason. Of course the internet is running at by roughly 20 years scale-wise in front of the cloud because obviously you need the internet because as you wouldn't be having a cloud. So, all of those growing pains why metrics are all of a sudden the thing, “Or have been for a few years now,” is basically, of course, people who were writing software, providing their own software services, hit the scaling limitations which you hit for Internet service providers two decades, three decades ago. But fundamentally, you have this complete system. Basically profiles or distributed tracing depending on how you view distributed tracing.You can also argue that distributed tracing is key events which are linked to each other. Logs sit firmly in the key event thing and then you turn this into numbers and that is metrics. And that's basically it. You have extremes at the and where you can have valid, depending on your circumstances, engineering trade-offs of where you invest the most, but fundamentally, that is why those always appear again in humanity's dealing with data, and observability is no different.Corey: I take a look at last month's AWS bill. Mine is pretty well optimized. It's a bit over 500 bucks. And right around 150 of that is various forms of logging and detecting change in the environment. And on the one hand, I sit here, and I think, “Oh, I should optimize that,” because the value of those logs to me is zero.Except that whenever I have to go in and diagnose something or respond to an incident or have some forensic exploration, they then are worth an awful lot. And I am prepared to pay 150 bucks a month for that because the potential value of having that when the time comes is going to be extraordinarily useful. And it basically just feels like a tax on top of what it is that I'm doing. The same thing happens with application observability where, yeah, when you just want the big substantial stuff, yeah, until you're trying to diagnose something. But in some cases, yeah, okay, then crank up the verbosity and then look for it.But if you're trying to figure it out after an event that isn't likely or hopefully won't recur, you're going to wish that you spent a little bit more on collecting data out of it. You're always going to be wrong, you're always going to be unhappy, on some level.Richard: Ish. You could absolutely be optimizing this. I mean, for $500, it's probably not worth your time unless you take it as an exercise, but outside of due diligence where you need specific logs tied to—or specific events tied to specific times, I would argue that a lot of the problems with logs is just dealing with it wrong. You have this one extreme of full-text indexing everything, and you have this other extreme of a data lake—which is just a euphemism of never looking at the data again—to keep storage vendors happy. There is an in between.Again, I'm biased, but like for example, with Loki, you have those same label sets as you have on your metrics with Prometheus, and you have literally the same, which means you only index that part and you only extract on ingestion time. If you don't have structured logs yet, only put the metadata about whatever you care about extracted and put it into your label set and store this, and that's the only thing you index. But it goes further than just this. You can also turn those logs into metrics.And to me this is a path of optimization. Where previously I logged this and that error. Okay, fine, but it's just a log line telling me it's HTTP 500. No one cares that this is at this precise time. Log levels are also basically an anti-pattern because they're just trying to deal with the amount of data which I have, and try and get a handle on this on that level whereas it would be much easier if I just counted every time I have an HTTP 500, I just up my counter by one. And again, and again, and again.And all of a sudden, I have literally—and I did the math on this—over 99.8% of the data which I have to store just goes away. It's just magic the way—and we're only talking about the first time I'm hitting this logline. The second time I'm hitting this logline is functionally free if I turn this into metrics. It becomes cheap enough that one of the mantras which I have, if you need to onboard your developers on modern observability, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, the whole bells and whistles, usually people have logs, like that's what they have, unless they were from ISPs or power companies, or so; there they usually start with metrics.But most users, which I see both with my Grafana and with my Prometheus [unintelligible 00:38:46] tend to start with logs. They have issues with those logs because they're basically unstructured and useless and you need to first make them useful to some extent. But then you can leverage on this and instead of having a debug statement, just put a counter. Every single time you think, “Hey, maybe I should put a debug statement,” just put a counter instead. In two months time, see if it was worth it or if you delete that line and just remove that counter.It's so much cheaper, you can just throw this on and just have it run for a week or a month or whatever timeframe and done. But it goes beyond this because all of a sudden, if I can turn my logs into metrics properly, I can start rewriting my alerts on those metrics. I can actually persist those metrics and can more aggressively throw my logs away. But also, I have this transition made a lot easier where I don't have this huge lift, where this day in three months is to be cut over and we're going to release the new version of this and that software and it's not going to have that, it's going to have 80% less logs and everything will be great and then you missed the first maintenance window or someone is ill or what have you, and then the next Big Friday is coming so you can't actually deploy there. I mean Black Friday. But we can also talk about deploying on Fridays.But the thing is, you have this huge thing, whereas if you have this as a continuous improvement process, I can just look at, this is the log which is coming out. I turn this into a number, I start emitting metrics directly, and I see that those numbers match. And so, I can just start—I build new stuff, I put it into a new data format, I actually emit the new data format directly from my code instrumentation, and only then do I start removing the instrumentation for the logs. And that allows me to, with full confidence, with psychological safety, just move a lot more quickly, deliver much more quickly, and also cut down on my costs more quickly because I'm just using more efficient data types.Corey: I really want to thank you for spending as much time as you have. If people want to learn more about how you view the world and figure out what other personal attacks they can throw your way, where's the best place for them to find you?Richard: Personal attacks, probably Twitter. It's, like, the go-to place for this kind of thing. For actually tracking, I stopped maintaining my own website. Maybe I'll do again, but if you go on github.com/ritchieh/talks, you'll find a reasonably up-to-date list of all the talks, interviews, presentations, panels, what have you, which I did over the last whatever amount of time. [laugh].Corey: And we will, of course, put links to that in the [show notes 00:41:23]. Thanks again for your time. It's always appreciated.Richard: And thank you.Corey: Richard Hartmann, Director of Community at Grafana Labs. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an insulting comment. And then when someone else comes along with an insulting comment they want to add, we'll just increment the counter by one.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

"History began when humans invented gods, and will end when humans become gods."—Yuval Noah Harari We welcome back to the programme Jeremiah Allen, a Christian entrepreneur now living in Belize, for a wide-ranging interview as part of the ongoing conversation here at TMR called: "Following Christ in the New Old Normal." In the first conversation, with Rev Phill Sacre, we discussed "awakeness" in the church and beyond in the post-covid era. In the second conversation Pastor Stephen Buckley shared his perspective on the covid era, interpreting the response of so many churches in terms of God's constructive judgement upon the churches themselves. In this third conversation, Jeremiah Allen shares with us his conviction that only with the Fruit of the Spirit, developing in our lives through closeness to God, will the Christian successfully navigate the troubled waters of the days ahead. Jeremiah joined us last year to discuss "Disruptions and Preparations", which in some ways could be seen as an introduction to the present series of conversations "Jeremiah is a 42-year-old former US Army soldier and Iraq War veteran ('04-'05). After leaving military service, he worked as a Computer Network Security Expert for the US Missile Defense Agency. In 2013, he left his lucrative career and relocated his wife & two children to pursue ministry in Belize as an entrepreneur. Jeremiah is passionate about Jesus and sharing the Good News with others by living out the Great Commission in everyday life." [For show notes please visit https://themindrenewed.com]